Readily enough resolved in GQ
Q: What’s 'Uptown" refer to
A: LMGTFU…“Suburbia, as opposed to downtown which refers more toward the central, often older and mercantile, part of a city.”
So that’s not what is wanted. I’ve never really been a town mouse, grew up in the country almostbutnotquite farmville. “Uptown” has only come to my attention twice: Velvet Underground’s “Waiting for my man” and the cinematic masterpiece that is “Uptown Saturday Night.” And with that very limited context the term conjures lower-middle class and predominantly Black neighborhoods. I’ve got a hunch there is a lot more to the term, possibly it carries no racial undertones at all.
The only Uptown that I am personally familiar with is in New Orleans. It is a mostly residential area but definitely still urban and not suburban. Tulane and Loyola are located there. The area is a mix of very rich people especially on St. Charles Avenue and some very poor neighborhoods that you don’t want to casually stroll through by yourself after dark. Like most of New Orleans, it varies a tremendous amount in terms of wealth and safety block by block and it racially mixed at least in the macro sense. Saying that you live Uptown in New Orleans is just a geographic description and doesn’t tell you anything else about the person without other information. You could be a white dishwasher at a restaurant, a black multi-millionaire with a mansion right on St. Charles or just a college student.
Uptown borders the Garden District as you head to the Central Business District (Downtown). The CBD is the central part of the city (where the Superdome is) except for the French Quarter.
Downtown generally refers to the center of a city, which pretty much every city has by default. But not all cities have an uptown. It mainly occurs in a city which is built so that the downtown center of the city is immediately adjacent to a body of water to the south. When that happens all movement away from downtown is, by default, north or “up”.
Examples of cities where this occurs are New Orleans, New York, Tampa, and Toronto.
A few cities, notably Charlotte, refer to the central business district as Uptown. To Manhattanites, it’s a specific direction on a long skinny island. In Chicago, the term refers to a specific Jazz Age bright-light district that benefited from a rapid transit line as well as the streetcars.
As an urban geographer, I sometimes use the term to denote a secondary business district that developed during the streetcar era some distance from the CBD. New Orleans is a prime example where it’s actually called Uptown. Once you start looking for these, you find them in nearly all big cities, and many are now enjoying a renaissance as artsy restaurant districts.
As indicated by the preceding threads, the meaning up “uptown” depends entirely on what city you’re talking about. In “Waiting for the Man”, the term is basically referring to Harlem; in Uptown Saturday Night, it’s Uptown, Chicago.
Yep. Back in the 80’s, it’s where all the Goths hung out, smoking clove cigarettes and hanging around in coffee shops until all hours of the morning, talking about the existential meaningless of life. Now, hipsters.